Durarara!! Volume 1

intention of playing along with Masaomi’s flirtation mission, but he was
interested in taking a closer look at the place he’d seen on television so many
times.

It was indeed the locale he recognized, but Mikado soon realized that seeing
it in person was a completely different experience. The location was the
backdrop for news broadcasts, TV dramas, and variety shows, but each program
gave it a different feeling.

Impressed with how editing and presentation could create such different
impressions of the same place, Mikado watched Masaomi do his thing. It was
exasperating.

Masaomi couldn’t find any high school girls his age, so he had to resort to
hitting on the office ladies who walked through the park on their lunch breaks.
Of course, no working adult (on their break) was going to sit around and
entertain the advances of a teenage boy. The sight of his desperate, futile
attempts was kind of touching in a way.

When Mikado relayed this to Masaomi after he took a short break, his friend
grinned and replied, “What do you mean? The goal is just to talk to women, and
I’m succeeding with flying colors! Besides, calling things desperate or futile is
the last thing you should do when talking to women! When you’re around a
beautiful woman, the only thing that ensures your actions are desperate or futile
is thinking that they are. You get me?”

“I don’t get you at all,” Mikado muttered and stretched lazily. There was no
point to just sitting around here all day, so he decided to head somewhere he
wanted to go. “I’m going over to 60-Kai Street on my own.”

“What? You think you can pick up chicks without a wingman? When did you
turn into such a lady-killer?”

“I’m not going to pick up chicks.”
But Masaomi wasn’t listening. He jabbed a finger at Mikado’s face and
leered, “You’re going to be reduced to tears over the loss of my skills soon
enough! You’re gonna wind up getting played by one of those ganguro girls who
don’t realize that the overtanned look was out of style years ago!”
“What does any of that have to do with your skill?!”
“Shut it, shut it, let your mouth be a door and shut it! Let’s have a
competition! We’ll see who can pick up more girls, me or you!”
“Seriously? You’re gonna hit on girls while trailing an entourage of girls you
hit on?”
Masaomi ignored him and started sprinting toward the station. Within

moments, he was calling out to a housewife with her child and shopping bags.
Mikado let out his deepest sigh of the day and headed to the east exit of the

station on his own.

It wasn’t a perfectly straight line, but he did manage to reach 60-Kai Street
with relative ease. This point actually wasn’t that far from his apartment. Mikado
planned to wander around checking out stores until nightfall, then head straight
home. If Masaomi was still the same person Mikado remembered from
elementary school, he’d forget about the silly competition and go home soon.

When they were seven, Masaomi was “it” in a game of hide-and-seek, and he
left to go home in the middle of the game. When Mikado finally returned home
that night in tears, Masaomi was there in the house. With his cheeks full of
Mikado’s dinner, he said, “Found ya.”

Now that I think about it, we had our share of adventures back in that town. I
wonder when those stopped happening.

There was nothing particularly interesting to relate from middle school. It was
just a very long succession of safe, boring days.

Mikado dreamed of the outside world but had no reason to leave his
hometown. He’d been stuck in an unchanging situation—until the day his family
got an Internet connection, and his world changed forever.

Now there were endless worlds at his fingertips. He had access to information
he would never learn from his ordinary life. It was as though, just on the other
side of the world he lived in, a much, much larger world had appeared. And in
the new world, there was no such thing as distance.

As he delved further and further into the world of the Net and found himself
on the verge of living a shut-in existence, Mikado one day came to an epiphany.
He was free to passively receive anything and everything from the Internet—but
when it came time to add his own information to that world, there was almost
nothing he had to say or share.

When he realized this, Mikado became even more fascinated with the world
outside of his town. The picture of Tokyo that Masaomi painted for him shone
brighter than ever before.

And now he was within that light. Masaomi claimed that the countryside was
where it was brightest now, but Mikado didn’t get that feeling yet. He knew what
his friend meant, and he didn’t intend to leave and never look back. But he knew
that when nostalgia did register, it would be further on in the future, not now.

Mikado just wanted to savor the taste of the big city and breathe in its air so
that it infused with his lungs.

As though he were a part of the city itself.

He spun around to take in more of the scenery and that city air.
Raira Academy uniforms filled 60-Kai Street, and the town itself seemed to
be dyed with the color of the outfit.
“They’re almost their own color gang,” he muttered, then noticed a familiar
face. “Sonohara!”
He was about to walk over to her when he noticed that she was surrounded by
other girls in the same uniform, and there was a prickly tension in the air. They
were close to the entrance of a side alley where it met the street, and the three
girls had Anri pinned against the wall.
Curious, Mikado carefully approached the alley. None of the four girls
noticed him, but he was close enough to make out every word of the
conversation. In fact, it was less of a conversation than a one-sided interrogation.
“I hear you think you’re some kinda big shot even without that Mika Harima
around.”
“…”
“And now you’re the class rep? What are you, some kinda goody-goody?”
“Why don’t you say something? You were like a barnacle stuck on Mika’s
side in middle school.”
The three girls were taking turns verbally abusing Anri, but she showed no
sign of reacting to any of it.
Are they seriously bullying her? Do people in Japan still do that?! And those
insults are so…clichéd! It’s like they walked out of an old manga!
Mikado found it hard to be intimidated by such stereotypical insults. As a
fellow class rep, he knew he ought to step in—but his brain was hung up on the
idea of what he should actually do. It wouldn’t really work to pretend he didn’t
see anything now, but he also didn’t like the idea of getting on the girls’ shit list.
I know! I’ll walk up with a smile and say, “Why, fancy meeting you here,
Sonohara,” as if I don’t realize she’s being picked on! Yes, that’s the plan! And if
those girls say anything, I’ll think on my feet.
His idea seemed trapped somewhere between optimism and pessimism, but
Mikado was already walking forward…when a hand caught his shoulder from
behind.
“?!”

He held his breath and turned around to see a familiar face.
“Stepping in to stop the bullying? Very brave,” said Izaya Orihara, looking
interested. He kept his grip but started pushing Mikado forward instead of
pulling.
“Uh, what?!” Mikado shrieked, finally drawing the attention of the four girls.
“H-h-hi, Sonohara, wh-wh-what a c-c-c-coincidennnn— Aaaa— Hang on!”
Izaya pushed him right into the midst of the girls.
“Wh-what’s the big deal?” asked one of the bullies, somewhat intimidated. It
was meant not for Mikado, but the man behind him, of course.
“You really shouldn’t be extorting people out in broad daylight like this. God
might let you get away with it, but the police won’t,” Izaya joked. He continued
to approach the girls. “Bullying really is the lamest thing you can do.”
“Like it’s any of your beeswax, old man!” the girls screeched, either because
they had finally shown their true colors or as a bluff to hide their fear.
“You’re right, it’s not,” he said, grinning. He delivered the three girls a
warning. “It’s none of my business. If you’re beat up and left here to die, that’s
none of my business. If I decided to assault you, if I decided to stab you, if you
decided to call me, a twenty-three-year-old man, “old,” it would not change the
fact that your affairs and mine are eternally unrelated. Every human being has a
connection to every other, and yet we are all unrelated.”
“Huh?”
“Human beings are so vapid,” Izaya said enigmatically and took another step
toward them. “Look, I’m not really into the idea of hitting girls.”
In the next moment, a small bag appeared in Izaya’s right hand.
“Huh? What?” one of the girls piped up, recognizing the expensive-looking
bag. Somehow it had made its way from its customary spot on her shoulder into
the man’s hands. The strap, still hanging over her shoulder, was cut clean at the
waist.
While the girls were thrown into confusion, Mikado was downright terrified.
In Izaya’s left hand, held behind his back, was a very sharp knife. The scariest
part was that Mikado had been watching the man’s movements the entire time,
but he never noticed where the knife came from or when he’d slashed the bag
free of the strap.
Izaya smartly folded up the knife and slipped it into the sleeve of his suit
jacket, all one-handed behind his back. Mikado felt like he was watching a
magician at work.
Still grinning, the older man pulled a cell phone out of the little bag.

“So I think I’ll start a new hobby—stomping on girls’ cell phones.”
He tossed her phone into the air. It clacked and clattered on the ground, the
case plastered in little stickers.
“Hey, what’s the big—?”
She quickly reached out to pick up the phone…
And Izaya stepped hard on it, just barely missing her outstretched fingers.
With the sound of crunching snacks, broken shards of split plastic appeared
under the sole of his shoe. The girl shrieked in horror, but Izaya stomped again
and again. The movement was mechanical and precise, hitting the exact same
spot over and over. The robotic repetition even extended to his laugh.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
“Oh my God, I think he’s on something!”
“What a creep! Let’s get outta here!”
The other two dragged off the victim of the phone stomping, who looked on
in mute shock. They exited the alley onto the main street and disappeared.
Once he was certain they were gone, Izaya’s laughing and stomping stopped
instantly. He turned to Mikado as if nothing had just happened. Anri did not run,
but stayed where she was, watching Izaya and Mikado with fright in her eyes.
“I’m bored. I think I’m over the phone-stomping fad,” Izaya said and gave
Mikado a gentle smile. “It’s pretty brave of you to help someone being bullied.
Most kids these days wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh…?”
Anri looked at Mikado, surprised. Given his extremely weak and passive
attempt to help, and the confusion wrought by Izaya’s grand entrance, Mikado
seemed to be trying to forget he’d done anything.
Unperturbed by any of this, Izaya addressed the boy slowly and deliberately.
“Mikado Ryuugamine, our meeting was no coincidence. I was searching for
you.”
“Huh?”
Mikado was about to ask what he meant by that when a trash can from a
convenience store hit Izaya square on the side.
The trash can fell in place, crashing to the ground with a tremendous
clattering.
“Guh!” Izaya grunted, losing his balance and falling to his knees. The metal
can hit him straight on, but the impact was from the flat side rather than an edge,
so the damage wasn’t as bad as it sounded.
Izaya lurched to his feet and glared in the direction the trash can had come

from.
“Sh-Shizu.”
“Iiizaaayaaa,” came a lazy voice. Mikado and Anri slowly turned toward it.
It was a young man with sunglasses. He was wearing a classic bartender’s

outfit with a snappy bow tie, like an old-fashioned solicitor for a cabaret club or
a hostess bar. The man was quite tall, though not as tall as Simon. But his frame
was lithe and compact, not the body of a man you’d expect to throw a trash can
that far.

“Didn’t I tell you never to show your face in Ikebukuro again, Iiizaaayaaa?”
Izaya very clearly recognized the man, and for the first time in Mikado’s
presence, the smile vanished from his face.
“I thought you were working over toward the West Gate, Shizu.”
“I got fired ages ago. Plus, I told you not to call me that, Iiizaaayaaa. How
many times have I told you that my name is Shizuo Heiwajima?” the man
growled, veins pulsing on his face. His features were ordinary enough that he
looked like a typical bartender by default, but the invisible aura of domination he
emitted tipped Mikado’s scales from intimidation straight into terror.



I’ve never actually seen someone with bulging veins in real life before,
Mikado initially thought, but in moments his body was completely controlled by
primal, instinctual fear.

Shizuo Heiwajima—one of the people Masaomi said never to mess with. He
had qualified that with “outside of yakuza,” so at the very least, this man was an
ordinary civilian. But Mikado felt with all of his being that if there was a person
who lived through violence alone, this was him.

It all made sense. Virtually any person living in Japan, upon seeing this man,
would know they didn’t want the first thing to do with him. It would be easier to
avoid him with a face that screamed danger from a distance, but it was his very
ordinary looks that made him so dangerous.

“Come on, Shizu. Are you still mad about me framing you for my crime?”
“I’m not mad at all. I just want to beat your brains in.”
“Oh, c’mon. Just let me go.”
Izaya pulled the knife out of his sleeve. “I don’t like your violence, Shizu,
because it doesn’t respond to reason, words, or logic.”
“Aaah!” Anri shrieked at the sight of the silvery blade, finally snapped out of
her daze. Mikado held his breath and tried to motion to her to run away. She
nodded, her back pressed to the wall, then clutched her bag to her chest and
raced away. Mikado followed right behind her, turning back just once to glance
down the alley.
Shizuo’s bellow of rage echoed off the walls, and people on the sidewalk
stopped and looked down the side alley. Then, parting the crowd, the enormous
shape of Simon, well over six feet tall—and Mikado couldn’t watch anymore.
Absolute terror swirled within him. His new city was a maelstrom of the
ordinary and extraordinary, but he didn’t know which of the two this was. The
only thing he knew was that he must never get involved with whatever that was.
He finally understood what Masaomi meant by the people to never make
enemies with.
And those are regular civilians. How terrifying must the yakuza and Chinese
mafia be?
The tales of violence he read about on the Net seemed like they had to
partially be just that: tales. Now that he’d come into direct contact with it
himself, Mikado was overwhelmed by the fear that actual violence inspired.
Finally, he gauged that it was safe, and he called out to Anri.
“H-hey, w…wait…hurts to…breathe…”
Sadly, even though he was running with all of his strength, he never once

broke ahead of Anri.
That was the cruel shackle of reality as Mikado Ryuugamine knew it.

“Are you all right?”
Mikado took Anri to a nearby café, hoping to calm her down. He ordered

them two cream sodas, then later realized it seemed like a childish choice.
“Um… Thank you for your help.”
“Uh, n-no, not at all! If anything, it was that Izaya guy who saved you!”
“But…”
Damn, what should I say? This just had to happen when Masaomi isn’t here

to help me out.
Mikado wasn’t sure what to do, but he knew that not saying anything at all

wasn’t an option, so he tried to find a topic.
“So…were those girls from your middle school?”
Anri nodded.
“That explains it. So when you were in middle school, this Mika girl was

there to stick up for you when they bugged you, but now that she’s gone, those
bullies from the past seized their chance to get back at you?”

Anri trembled at Mikado’s conjecture. “H-how did you know that?!”
“Um, j-just a guess based on the conversation… Anyway, is this Mika the
Mika Harima from our class?”
She seemed to be calmer now and started to explain. “The thing is…Mika’s
been marked absent at school, but in fact, she hasn’t been home at all since the
day before the entrance ceremony.”
“…Huh?”
That seemed like a matter for the police. The concern must have shown in
Mikado’s eyes, because Anri quietly shook her head.
“Technically, she’s not missing—she’s been sending e-mails to both my cell
phone and her family. Messages like, ‘I’m going on a journey of spiritual
healing.’ Or a report of whatever train station she’s currently at.”
“Spiritual healing? What happened?”
“Well, uh…”
For the first time, Anri was unable to answer. She cast her eyes down, clearly
not wanting to talk about it.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. The guy who would talk is too busy having

an affair with a housewife right now,” Mikado blabbered while insisting on his
ability to keep secrets. Anri failed to notice the contradiction. She thought for
several moments.

“Will you promise not to be shocked?”
“Oh, nothing could shock me after the scene we just witnessed,” Mikado said,
putting on his most reassuring smile. The time he spent with Masaomi in
elementary school had taught him the proper way to soften a situation for the
other person.
That boyish smile apparently did the trick, because Anri put it as bluntly as
possible.
“Mika Harima…is a stalker.”
Plurfp!
Half-melted ice cream spurted out of Mikado’s smiling mouth.

Once her story was done, Mikado tried to piece it together.
“I see… So Yagiri the Health Committee rep was being bothered…er,
romantically approached by Mika, and when he turned her down, she went on a
journey of healing to fix her broken heart?”
According to Anri, Mika Harima had a habit of doing this, going back to
middle school—picking the locks of the homes of boys she fell in love with at
first sight or researching their vacation destinations and meeting them there, only
to thank them for inviting her. In short, she changed the truth to whatever suited
her.
On top of that personality, she had excellent grades and a rich family. She got
her own apartment to live in while at high school, one with a monthly rent of
more than 100,000 yen. Raira Academy had its own dorm, but it was located so
far away from the school campus that most students chose to commute from
home or got their own apartments to learn independent living at a young age.
Mikado was one of the latter, as was Anri, who had a cheap place a little farther
away.
This Harima girl’s got quite a life.
Then she met Seiji Yagiri and decided that he was The One. She started
visiting his home, then failed to show up for the first day of school. According to
Seiji, he gave her a very convincing no on the day before the entrance ceremony,
warned her that he’d call the police—and hadn’t seen her since.
Mikado felt a cold sweat forming as he heard more and more of Anri’s story.

Apparently she’d been sitting between him and Seiji during the school’s entrance
exams. It could very easily have been Mikado whom Mika had decided to
follow. He was secretly relieved that he hadn’t saved any girls in town so far—
not that he would’ve been able to if he wanted.

He didn’t let any of these thoughts cross his face, though. Mikado was all
business as he listened to Anri’s story.

“So what happens when you call her?”
“She won’t pick up… It seems like she keeps her phone off except to send
messages… When I brought that up in an e-mail, she said she didn’t want to hear
my voice because it would make her homesick…”
“I see… Hmmm. I wonder if it’s best to just hang back for now… Or maybe,
just in case, you could put a little pressure on her in a message by saying you
might have to call the police if you don’t hear her voice?”
Mikado tried a number of commonsense suggestions, but none were solid
opinions of his. Time dragged on without an apparent solution.
“By the way, would you say you’re her best friend?”
“…I can’t say for certain, but we were together all the time. I’m a bit
awkward and don’t know how to get along with people, and she was the one
who took me by the hand and pulled me along. After that, we were always
together…”
Mikado suddenly realized that the two girls were not just simple friends. One
heard stories about this on the Internet, where the beating heart of such
friendships was always spelled out in the most gruesome, harsh terms.
“Plus, with her grades, she could have gone to a much better school than this.
Instead, she chose to go to mine. I felt really bad about that…”
That’s probably because she thought you were a useful tool and foil for her
and didn’t want to lose you…
Mikado just barely kept that sentiment from reaching his lips. He was very
glad that Masaomi wasn’t present. If this conversation was happening in a chat
room, he’d have blurted that out without a second thought.
But maybe making that clear would ultimately be the best for her, Mikado
thought, his eyes wandering as his mind grappled with indecision.
Anri noticed this and giggled. “It’s okay, I know the truth.”
Shocked that he was so easy to read, Mikado stammered a hasty “Wh-what?”
“I know that I was nothing more than a foil for her. And to be frank, I was
using her as well. I don’t think I could survive without doing that. The reason I
volunteered for the class rep job was because I knew she’d want to do it. So I

figured if she wasn’t able, at least it should be me.”
Now everything made sense to Mikado. When Anri looked his way during

homeroom, it wasn’t him she was looking at—it was Mika’s empty seat. Only it
wasn’t empty because Masaomi was occupying it.

Meanwhile, Anri revealed some information he hadn’t asked her for.
“But, in fact, it’s just for my own self-satisfaction. I felt like, if I can be the
class rep, I might even be able to surpass her… I think it’s very unfair of me.”
Before she could finish her thought, Mikado cut in, his voice cold and
clinical. “Actually, the worst part of it is that you’re telling someone else.”
“…”
“It’s like you’re hoping that someone unrelated to the situation will forgive
you for your actions. At least trying to be better than her in some fashion is the
right choice. So you should hold your head high and do it fair and square.”
Inwardly, Mikado chided himself for taking it too far. After their long
conversation, he’d gotten so engaged that he ended up telling her something he
would normally have kept to himself. He watched her reaction, half-afraid she
would explode with anger—but she seemed neither angry nor upset.
“Yes, I suppose so… Thank you,” she smiled sadly.
Mikado thought to himself, How pretty must Mika Harima be if she’s using
this girl to make herself look better?
It was probably more of a foil for personality than for looks, but Mikado
couldn’t help but wonder.

“Um, thank you very much.”
Anri bowed to Mikado again as they said good-bye. Mikado wanted to pay
for their order at the café, but she insisted, and they split the bill. The shadows
were stretching long across 60-Kai Street, and the deepening sky silently stared
down at the two.
“No, it’s okay. This was the first time we ever talked, but now that we’re the
representatives of our class, I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other.”
Anri smiled kindly and nodded.
“Actually, Ryuugamine, I’ve known about you for a while.”
“Huh?”
“When I came to deliver my enrollment form to the office, they checked it
against a list of names. I spotted a cool-looking name on the list, and no sooner
had I noticed it than someone came and checked it off…”

Something weird was happening. Mikado gave her a bland affirmative, trying
to dispel the feeling of dread welling up in his chest.

“And now…the owner of that very name has helped me out of a bind.”
Just a second.
It was starting to sound exactly like the situation between Mika and Seiji.
Anri was smiling at him, her face a mask over her true intentions.
Uh, crap. I don’t think I’m ready for a stalker… But would it be so bad if it
was a really cute girl like her? Yes, it would. What if she ends up stabbing me?!
Or she might set my house on fire or take my family hostage… But if it turns out
she’s cool, then I wouldn’t mind her stalking me… Wait, no! If she’s a stalker,
that rules out the possibility of being cool entirely! Then again, if I really had to
choose yes or no…
After three seconds of wild, circular speculation, Mikado realized he had no
idea how to react to his classmate.
Anri noticed his discomfort and giggled. “I’m joking.”
“Uh…”
“I’m sure you don’t want someone like me hanging around and bothering
you. But don’t worry, I’m not a stalker.”
Along with the realization that she was teasing him, Mikado felt a deep
shame at having been so obvious—as well as an even greater sense of guilt.
“…Sorry.”
“Huh? N-no, don’t apologize! I’m the one who was teasing you!” Anri
stammered, wide-eyed, clearly not expecting an apology.
They both cast about awkwardly for something to say, and Mikado broke the
silence with a simple “Well, see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, I suppose we’ll be seeing plenty of each other.”
She might have a bit of a sneaky streak to her, but she’s a good person at
heart, Mikado thought as he headed back to his apartment. She wasn’t the
otherworldly spirit he originally imagined, just a normal girl with an awkward
life.
Maybe it’s kind of like my relationship with Masaomi. He’s the one who
always tugs me around, and it’s how I came into contact with my new world
here.
Mikado shook his head, reminding himself that he shouldn’t be thinking that
way. Instead, he remembered the girl named Mika Harima, who had disappeared
after her crush rejected her advances.
“He must have really shut her down hard. But if that’s all it took to make her

give up, maybe she wasn’t that bad of a stalker to begin with,” he mumbled to
himself.

Then again, according to Anri’s story, Mika had picked the lock of her crush’s
apartment—while she was in middle school. Would she really give up on her
“man of fate” because of a little police threat?

Mikado realized he was spending serious thought on a stalker he’d never met.
He rolled his head back to the sky and sighed.

I know I was hoping for some wild stuff to happen, but not these
disappearances and stalkers.

He swallowed his melancholy and stopped walking, hoping for a change of
pace. Maybe he could find a hundred-yen shop to browse through on the way
back home.

A sound that bridged reality and fantasy hit his ears.
An engine rumble like the whinny of some living animal. It groaned and
growled in fits and starts, sounding more agitated than ever before.
“The Black Rider!”
Mikado couldn’t stifle his rising curiosity and excitement—he never expected
to hear the bike so close to the crowded station. He raced off in the direction of
the sound.
Just one turn at the next intersection and it should be in view. He tried not to
let the moment take control of him, pulled right around the corner—

And into a scene from an old-fashioned manga.

“… Oh ho. So you ran into a beautiful girl rounding a corner, and she just so
happened to be running from a bad guy on a motorcycle, plus she has amnesia.
And you want me to accept each and every one of those details at face value.”

“What can I say? It’s all true.”
“If there’s one thing amongst all that truth that doesn’t make sense, it’s the
mystery of why she ran into you around that corner instead of me.”
Mikado and Masaomi were arguing in the midst of a cramped apartment room
measuring just four and a half tatami mats—less than a hundred square feet.
Mikado’s new apartment contained no other appliances than a PC with
onboard TV tuner and a rice cooker. It was one of the cheapest rooms in his
building—the only one cheaper was the three-tatami room next door. It was only

because that spot was taken that Mikado had to take the more expensive option.
But apparently that tenant was a cameraman who was typically out on location,
so most days it was empty.

He felt he could have taken that tiny room, but now that he had a guest over,
he realized just how small four and a half already was and thanked God that he
hadn’t tried for a three-mat room given the current circumstances.

Unlike Mikado’s wild confusion over said circumstances, Masaomi was calm
and cool.

“Now, it would have been really trite—er, tight—if you were running late for
school. It would have been marvelous if she turned out to be a new transfer
student to your class. And it would have been perfect if she was a queen from a
far-off country…and your long-lost childhood friend to boot!”

Mikado rubbed his chin, completely ignoring Masaomi’s ideas.
I know I asked for the extraordinary, but this much of it makes me wonder if
it’s all a dream. I hope it’s a dream.
Masaomi continued goofing around, despite Mikado’s silence.
“Did you pick up on that pun with trite and tight?”
“There’s nothing less funny than explaining your own joke.”
Mikado looked down at the girl lying next to them, feeling like he had just
said that not long ago. He couldn’t tell how old she was, but she looked older
than him. She slept in total peace, wearing plain pajamas that looked like they
came from a nearby hospital.
When they collided just around that corner, she asked him for help. He stood
there in confused disbelief until he noticed a black motorcycle was heading
straight for them.
The rest he did not remember. Apparently he grabbed her by the arm and
pulled her into the train station. The motorcycle couldn’t follow him down there,
and they left from a different exit, then ran to Mikado’s apartment.
“It sounded like she lost her memory, and she said not to call the police…so I
didn’t know what else to do…”
“Just have to wait it out, I guess,” said Masaomi, watching the sleeping girl.
“She is beautiful, though. Almost doesn’t look Japanese… In fact, is she
Japanese?”
“Well, she was speaking Japanese…”
They decided that waiting until tomorrow to ask her more was the best plan.
Normally, the circumstances dictated that such a person be turned over to the
police for help, regardless of what they said, but Mikado had no intention of

doing that.
Yes, it might be a well-worn development, but it was still a scene right out of

a movie or comic book. This was the exact kind of adventure he wanted.
The only thing that caused him concern was the fact that the Black Rider

might now be able to recognize him. He’d grabbed the girl and safely gotten
away, but he still had no idea why the black motorcycle would be chasing her. If
he had to survive in the big city knowing that the urban legend Black Rider was
after him…

He hated normal, boring stuff. He wanted a different life than the one regular
people had. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to harbor this mysterious girl.

But escaping the ordinary required the assumption of risks.
Was the Black Rider my risk?
Mikado’s imagination set him shivering as Masaomi said good-bye.

There was one thing Mikado kept secret from his friend.
A bandage was currently wrapped around the girl’s neck. It hadn’t been there
before Masaomi came over to visit, but once Mikado got a good look at her, he
noticed something very striking.
Below her head, in a clean circle running completely around her neck, was a
series of needle marks resembling medical stitches.
As though a saw had taken her head right off, and someone had sewn it back
on.



Chapter 9: Double Heroine,
Wounded Girl

We rewind the clock.
Right around the time that Mikado and Anri walked into the café, a “pawn”

elsewhere in the neighborhood lurched into motion.

Research lab, Yagiri Pharmaceuticals

A dull thud echoed off the walls of the Lab Six meeting room.
“What do you mean…escaped?”
Coffee streamed across the table out of the tipped cup next to Namie Yagiri’s

clenched fist. The scalding liquid burned the skin of her hand, but she didn’t bat
an eye. Her fist trembled only with quiet rage and panic.

“If the police find out, we’re done for! All of us!”
She scanned the faces of her subordinates, anger and haste glittering in her
eyes.
“So you played nice and quiet while you were looking for your chance to
escape…”
Eventually she bit her lip to hold the rage inside. Her tongue was painted a
darker red than just from her lipstick.
“…Very well. I want our full street-level forces in action. No more skulking
around in the shadows now, use every possible resource—and if any trouble
arises, have it taken care of promptly.”
“Shall I order them not to harm the target?” asked one of the men at her side.
Namie thought it over briefly, then gave the order in unequivocal terms.
“It would be quite a shame—but in this case, I want our property returned,
dead or alive.”

Seiji Yagiri sighed as he made his way to the research lab where he would find
his sister.

Yes, this is love. A love that cannot be stopped.
Seiji first met “her” five years ago. As a ten-year-old boy, his sister snuck him
face-to-face with his uncle’s secret.
“She” was like a sleeping beauty in a fairy tale, waiting for the arrival of her
Prince Charming within that glass case. Despite the grisly appearance of a
severed head, Seiji felt not the least bit of fear or disgust. His boyish heart was
completely bewitched by the majesty of the object.
As he grew older, Seiji developed reason. But his sense of reason originated
from, and revolved around, her head, and she eventually ate away at his mind.
The head did not cast a conscious spell on him, nor did it use some kind of brain
waves or pheromones. The head just lived. And in the act of staying true to his
heart, Seiji Yagiri fell completely in love with her.
Just as Namie Yagiri looked to her brother for love, that brother sought love
from a mute head. And that pure desire spurred him into motion.
When his sister took the head away under the guise of research, Seiji thought,
I want to set her free from the prison of that glass case. I want to show her the
world.
He believed that she would want it that way and waited years for his chance
to strike. He stole his sister’s security card, memorized the patrol guards’ routes,
then knocked them out with a stun baton. Seiji felt no guilt—he only wanted to
see the joy on her face. But even after taking her out of the lab, she did not wake.
The head did not return his love. But that was because his love was
insufficient, he told himself. Thus did Seiji continue to believe that his utterly
one-sided infatuation was in fact an eternal bond.
Why does love once gained and then lost feel so dear? Seiji lamented, like
some preteen in love with the idea of love, as he strode toward the laboratory
with severe purpose.
“I know I told sis to handle it…but I just can’t let her be alone in there. Plus,
it’s just too cruel to cut open her head and peer inside, even if it is for the sake of
science,” he muttered to himself, completely unaware of the dire nature of
events. Seiji passed through the entrance doors of the lab.
“I shouldn’t have given her back. I should have fought and argued. As long as
I show them the truth of my love, sis and Uncle will understand eventually. And

if that doesn’t work, we can just elope.”
They were the words of some star-crossed nobleman hoping to marry a

commoner, but there was no hesitation or doubt in Seiji’s intent. By all
appearances, he seemed to be a perfectly normal, optimistic teenage boy—but
that very ordinariness turned horribly, grotesquely wrong when his love interest
was revealed to be a living, sleeping head.

Even worse, however, was the fact that the entire existence of Mika Harima
was completely, permanently gone from his mind. She had impacted him
directly, but he could no longer recall her face or the sound of her voice. As an
obstacle to his love, Seiji had eradicated all traces of her from his memory, and a
man who lived on love alone had no need to recall the obstacles he had
eliminated.

If I have to, I’ll just steal her keycard again, Seiji thought as he watched a
cleaning van race out of the laboratory’s parking lot.

Seiji knew they were not cleaners, but the so-called “underlings” of the lab:
kidnappers doing its dark bidding. And not kidnappers involved with slavery
rings in some far-off country, but the kind dealing with illegal human
experiments.

On top of that, Seiji knew that they got into this abduction business because
of their research on her. They ran experiments on the kidnapped victims using
the cells, genetic data, and even liquids they extracted from her. It baffled him
why they needed to go to these paranoid, urban legend lengths to study an actual
head that really existed, but it probably had to do with the pressure being put on
Yagiri Pharmaceuticals by that Nebula company. At least, as far as Seiji
understood it.

Apparently the experiments were not cruel, grisly vivisections, but conducted
after using anesthetics to put the subjects into a coma. Once they got the data
they wanted, the victims were released alive in a park or some other location.
They would choose victims that couldn’t otherwise go to the police about their
abduction—illegal immigrants or criminal types without the backing of one of
the powerful mobs—but there were also rumors that the underlings would
kidnap runaway girls and other lucrative targets to make their own money on the
side.

The bastards make me sick. Have they no respect for human life?
Seiji glared at the van as it passed, filled with a righteous anger—then noticed
that someone was stuck to the rear door of the van.

The thing—no, the person—clinging onto the back of the vehicle had a scar
running around her neck.

And above that scar—was the head of his dearly beloved.

The lightless motorcycle sped down the street outside the train station without a
sound.

It passed directly in front of the police box, but the officers did not notice the
dark, silent vehicle. At worst, the occasional pedestrian looked on in confusion
at a motorcycle emitting no engine sound. It was trying to stay relatively
inconspicuous in that very public location, so it wasn’t reckless—if anything, the
rider was careful not to let its darkened bike cause other vehicles to collide.
When it did speed up, it let the engine roar a tiny bit, just to alert the people
around it of its presence.

The headless horse—the Coiste Bodhar—could frighten people with its roar,
and that had not changed since its spirit had been transferred to a motorcycle, but
occasionally it had the opposite effect, drawing the excited interest of onlookers
instead. Despite her alarm at the varied nature of the humans around her, the
dullahan had learned how best to ride through the town over the years. She just
didn’t realize that she had become the stuff of urban legend.

When she didn’t have any work, Celty wandered around the town searching
for her head—but naturally, she never just happened across a severed head lying
on the ground, so it was an essentially meaningless activity. The dullahan
understood that perfectly well, but she couldn’t stand the idea of just sitting
around doing nothing, and so she wandered.

To her surprise, she had seen essentially zero fairies or spirits aside from
herself since coming to Japan. On very rare occasions, she might sense the
tiniest sliver of something from the trees lining the center of a park or along the
entrance to 60-Kai Street, but she had never seen them for herself. She had felt
many more of her kind back in Ireland. Celty thought it would be better to have
another dullahan along to help her look for the head, but that was out of the
question now. Twenty years later, the security around ship stowaways and
smugglers was far stronger. It would take the presence of that very head of hers
to leave Japan at this point.

It eventually dawned on Celty that it might be completely impossible for her

to find supernatural entities like herself within the limits of her abilities here.
That’s just the world of man for you. I suppose it would be the same in New

York or Paris. Perhaps if I looked in the forest of Hachioji…or just traveled all
the way to Hokkaido or Okinawa, where there’s more nature…

But without her head, she could not travel anywhere without Shinra’s help.
There was only so far a person could go wearing a helmet without drawing extra
suspicion.

Besides, she couldn’t leave Tokyo until she had found her head. What if she
left for a different region now, and when she came back, that faint sensation
she’d followed here was gone for good?

By checking the locations that she could no longer sense the head against a
map, Celty knew that wherever her head was, it was centered in Ikebukuro. But
without a way to narrow that down to anything more specific, her only option
was just to wander around the area in search of it.

Ultimately, that search was in the form of a simple type of street patrol. If she
found something curious, she looked it up on the Internet, and anything more
suspicious than that required the help of Shinra or Izaya to identify. That was the
best she could do.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, she had gained no hints whatsoever in twenty
years.

Facing another day of undoubtedly useless searching, Celty heard Shinra’s
words echo inside of her heart.

“Just give up.”
That wasn’t an option. She wasn’t exactly unhappy with her life as it stood
now, but in order to stifle the feeling that swirled within her, she needed to find
true tranquillity. She needed her head back.
The light turned red, and Celty came to a silent stop. As she waited, a figure
at the side of the intersection called out to her.
“Yo, Celty.”
She looked over to see a man wearing a bartender’s outfit. It was Shizuo
Heiwajima, whose name meant “Quiet Island of Peace”—or, as Shinra called
him, the “guy in town who least lives up to his name.”
“Can I talk to you for a sec?”
Celty had been patrolling Ikebukuro for twenty years, and for much of that
time, she’d known this man. Of course, he had no idea of Celty’s true nature or
her gender, but Shizuo was also the kind of man who didn’t bother with little

details like that. When the light turned green, Celty turned left and pulled over to
step off the bike.

Shizuo’s clothes were ripped here and there, as though slashed by a knife. He
had probably just been in a fight.

If anyone could have cut up Shizuo’s outfit like this, it was probably Izaya
Orihara. Sure enough, that information came straight from the horse’s mouth in
seconds.

“Izaya’s back here in Ikebukuro… I was just about to sock him a good one,
but Simon stepped in to stop me in the nick of time.”

Based on just that statement, Shizuo was indeed a laid-back, well-behaved
person. But that was only because Celty never talked.

Shizuo snapped at the tiniest things. He got irritated and angered over words,
so the more talkative a person, the quicker he became enraged. She’d seen
Shinra and Shizuo have a conversation once, and it was as tender and tricky a
situation as handling a stick of dynamite with the fuse lit.

He especially hated people who argued in logical circles, and thus Shizuo and
Izaya Orihara were always at odds. For his part, Izaya hated people that his logic
didn’t work on, so the two of them kept antagonizing the other.

Until Izaya moved to Shinjuku, the two fought on 60-Kai Street nearly every
day, until Simon broke up their brawl and forced them into his sushi shop, each
and every time.

As a parting gift when he moved away, Izaya framed Shizuo for several
crimes and was crafty enough not to attract any attention to his part in them.

After that, their rivalry was set in stone, and trouble always followed
whenever one visited the other’s neighborhood. “Trouble” meaning simple
fights, of course, but Izaya was clever enough to maneuver such that they never
got the police or yakuza involved.

“Unlike Kadota or Yumasaki, when I get into trouble I’m always alone. I
think the same goes for Izaya. He doesn’t have any friends or partners. Which
isn’t to say that I don’t get lonely myself. I want to have connections to other
people, even if it’s only going through the motions.”

Celty nodded to show the grumbling brawler she understood.
A bartender in sunglasses and a shadow wearing a helmet. It was a surreal
pairing at a glance, but the people around them barely did more than look and
showed no signs of interest.
Shizuo had clearly been drinking, probably at Simon’s sushi place. Celty felt
it would be cruel to just leave him hanging, so she let him speak his mind for a

bit, until…
“What I want to know is, what’s Izaya doing back here?”
Celty knew the answer to that question. Ikebukuro was simply the setting for

Izaya’s latest twisted interest. But there was another detail weighing on her
mind.

The strange thing is that he was here for two days in a row.
Izaya’s base for his information brokerage business was in Shinjuku. He
wasn’t the kind of man with time on his hands every day. If he was hanging
around, especially with Shizuo’s presence, he had to be doing so with a specific
purpose in mind.
“Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I saw him speaking to some kid
from Raira Academy…”
Shizuo stopped in the middle of his thought. He looked through the crowds.
“What’s that?”
Celty turned to view the surrounding area. Amid the mass of people coming
and going, a number of them were watching a specific person. Right at the center
of those gathered gazes was a single woman.
On the street behind them was a woman in pajamas, probably in her late
teens, tottering through the sunset on uncertain legs. Perhaps she had been hurt,
or perhaps she just escaped from the clutches of some of the city’s unsavory
residents.
Celty had no desire to draw extra attention, but given that someone’s life
might be hanging in the balance, she let herself focus on the woman anyway.
And froze on the spot.
It was her face as she remembered it from the water surface or the reflection
of windows.
Hair as black as darkness, just tracing over her eyes, features that were carved
into her heart long in the distant past—right atop the shoulders of the woman
stumbling across the sidewalk in her pajamas!
Celty’s emotions exploded. She raced forward. Shizuo followed her over to
the woman, curious. She grabbed the unsteady woman by the wrist and
forcefully turned her for a better look. The woman swallowed in shock, then
shrieked madly, trying to undo Celty’s grip.
“Ah… Aaaah, noooo!”
The crowd turned its attention on Celty, but she was too agitated to notice.
She only wanted a better look at the woman’s face, but the situation was too
chaotic to pull out her PDA for a message now.

“Uh, please calm down. We’re not here to hurt you,” Shizuo said helpfully as
he approached. He put a hand on her shoulder, hoping to calm her down.

Thukk.
A shock ran through his side. Something felt very wrong around his thigh,
just below the buttock, sending both cold and heat into his pants.
“Wha…?”
Shizuo swung around to see a young man wearing a school blazer, crouched
down and stabbing something into Shizuo’s thigh.
It was an ordinary office-use ballpoint pen, the kind one would find
anywhere. The boy’s bag was half-open—he must have pulled the pen out of that
and stabbed it into Shizuo’s leg.
“What…?”
“Let go of her!” the boy shouted.
Celty turned to see what this new disturbance was, noticed the sudden
bloodshed, and stopped in her tracks.
Sensing an opportunity, the girl in the pajamas tugged herself free of Celty’s
grip and started running down the street. Celty moved to follow her but held up
at the last moment, looking back. Shizuo was standing there with two pens
jammed into his thigh, while the young man in the blazer was pulling out a third.
The crowd burst into worried murmurs, several of them falling back in panic.
Some affected a mix of nonchalance and fear, trying to skirt around the crowd as
though nothing was happening, while others just walked straight through the
scene in complete ignorance. Some even pulled out their phones to snap pictures.
There were two police boxes in the vicinity, but the situation erupted directly
between both of them, and it would take a three hundred–yard run to reach either
one.
With a brief glance at the crowd, the young man in the blazer looked in the
direction the girl in pajamas went, his third pen still in hand.
Then he muttered, “Thank goodness…”
Celty was going to demand what he meant by that, but Shizuo thrust out a
hand first. His palm snapped to a halt right before the edge of her helmet, and he
smiled as though nothing was wrong.
“I’m fine. Too drunk to feel much pain. You go after her. I don’t know what’s
going on, but you need to follow her, don’t you?”
He folded up his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket, then
smacked his own face.
“Ha-ha! Always wanted to say that one. ‘I’ll handle this. You go on ahead!’”

That line was usually reserved for when the enemy was unfathomably strong,
and if anything it was the student boy whose life was now in danger—but Celty
decided to indulge Shizuo rather than worry about the young man’s well-being.
Besides, if she stuck around and they got caught by the police, she might be able
to explain that Shizuo was the victim, but she wouldn’t be able to explain who
she was.

Celty put her hands together in apology, then straddled her bike to chase after
the girl. People in the crowd exclaimed in surprise at the Black Rider’s presence
in their midst. Her trusty steed roared high, drowning out the onlookers as it
echoed throughout the night city.

“Stop!” The boy in the blazer tried to chase after her.
“That’s what I’m saying.” Shizuo grabbed the boy by the back of his collar
and dragged him backward. “Is that your girlfriend?”
“Yes! She’s my soulmate!” the boy—Seiji Yagiri—stated with absolute
confidence, flailing wildly in an attempt to escape.
“Why is she like…that?” Shizuo asked, still entirely calm.
“I have no idea!”
“What’s her name?”
“How the hell should I know?!”
The crowd, watching at a distance, felt a sudden chill. The man in the
bartender’s outfit, who had seemed relatively normal and nice, now had veins
bulging on his face. The warmth drained out of the air.
All of that heat sucked out of the surrounding space was added to his rage—
and Heiwajima exploded. “What the hell is that?!”
The young man flew.
“No way!” the crowd shrieked.
Without a shred of hesitation, Shizuo tossed Seiji’s body directly into the
street. He slammed into the side of a delivery truck that was waiting at the light.
If the light had been green, Seiji might easily be dead in seconds. Even more
shocking was the sheer distance for one human being to throw another. Every
person watching the scene sucked in a freezing breath.
“Isn’t it just a liiittle irresponsible, not even knowing your girl’s name? Huh?”
Seiji’s bounce off the truck landed him back on the sidewalk. Shizuo walked
over and grabbed him by the collar again, pulling him up to chest level.
But even numbed by that powerful shock, Seiji met Shizuo’s monstrous glare
with a powerful gaze of purpose.

“Names don’t matter…when you’re truly in love!”
“Huh?” Shizuo glared at him even harder, but Seiji did not falter in the least.
“How do you know she’s your soul mate when you don’t even know her name
yet?”
“Because I love her. I don’t need any other reason! Love cannot be measured
by or put into words!”
Shizuo glared back at him, deep in thought. Seiji held his arm high, pen still
in hand.
“Which is why I use actions! I’m here to protect her, and that’s all there is!”
He thrust the pen downward toward Shizuo’s face. The older man easily
stopped the pen with his other hand. His eyes were red with rage, and a devilish
smile split his face.
“I like you more than Izaya, at least.”
Shizuo ripped the pen away from Seiji’s hand and held the boy out at arm’s
length.
“So I’ll let you off with this,” he said and yanked his arm in so that his head
smashed against Seiji’s forehead. With a pleasant little crack, Seiji fell to his
knees.
Shizuo dropped his victim and made to leave the scene.
“Ugh, these are gonna bleed if I pull them out. Gotta buy some bandages
before I extract them. Or maybe instant glue would be better…”
Muttering, Shizuo walked off the street down the alley. The crowd split into
two around him, desperately trying to stay out of his path—and one by one, they
returned to the mass of pedestrian traffic. Eventually, it was as if nothing had
ever happened. Seiji unsteadily climbed to his feet, and the only people watching
were doing so out of the corners of their eyes from the distant street corner.

“Damn…” Seiji quietly walked on, his head screaming in agony. “Gotta find
her… Gotta help…”

Two police officers approached the stumbling boy.
“Are you all right?”
“Can you walk on your own?”
They had received reports of a fight and came to see, but only Seiji was left,
and there were no other traces of the altercation. Shizuo never pulled the pens
out of his leg, so whatever blood he lost was all on his pants.
“I’m all right. I just fell, that’s all.”
“Now, now. We just need you to come to the outpost with us.”

“We only want to talk. Besides, you shouldn’t be walking in that state.”
The policemen appeared to be genuinely concerned for him, but Seiji didn’t
have time for any of this. He looked around for any signs of her—then heard the
growl of that black motorcycle.
He shot around in the right direction, then saw the Black Rider racing for the
entrance to the subway…chasing after the girl in pajamas.
“Yama, that’s the bike!”
“Forget it, that’s above our pay grade. Let Traffic handle it.”
Seiji heard none of that. He only had eyes for the girl.
She disappeared into the underground entrance, pulled by someone else. In
fact, it looked like—
“Mikado…Ryuugamine,” Seiji muttered, recognizing his class rep. He started
off for the station.
“Hey, wait!”
“You’re gonna hurt yourself!”
The police held him down, and Seiji struggled helplessly. At top condition, he
might have been able to momentarily break free, but the damage caused by
Shizuo prevented him from using his full strength.
“Let go! Let go of me! She’s there! Right there! Let go, let go, let go! Why,
dammit, why?! Why is every damn person in the world trying to ruin my love
life?! What did I do to deserve this?! What did she do to deserve this?! Let go,
let go, let gooooo!”

“So your head was walking around, attached to a different body, and just when
you thought you had her, a student interfered, and when you pursued the girl, a
different student stepped in and took your head away—and you want me to
believe that nonsense?”

Shinra spread his arms theatrically in the middle of his apartment, wearing his
usual white lab coat. Celty paid his gestures no mind, her fingers limply sliding
over the keyboard.

“I’m not demanding that you believe me.”
“Oh, but I do. You’ve never lied to me.”
Shinra put on a rousing speech from the other room, hoping to cheer Celty up.
“They say a man’s best friends are honesty, sincerity, and wisdom, but in my
case, you’re the only one I need! Honest, sincere, and wise: I’m proud to have

such a perfect life partner!”
“Who said we were life partners?” Celty typed back, but nothing in her

reaction suggested disgust at Shinra.
“We could change those three qualities to effort, friendship, and victory

instead. How about that?”
“Listen to me. No, not listen—I mean, read the words on the screen,” she

typed, exasperated. The doctor continued talking, paying her no attention.
“Then I must do my best to live up to them, sparing no effort or expense in

traversing my game of fate with you to victory.”
“What about friendship?”
“You always have to start as friends, don’t you?”
Celty couldn’t be bothered to get seriously angry at Shinra’s nonsense. She

shrugged and decided to take a look at tomorrow’s schedule.
“At any rate, I can’t sit around feeling sorry for myself. It’s possible that I

could finally retrieve my head. I’m pretty sure those uniforms were from Raira,
so I’ll stake out the school’s front gate tomorrow and wait for that student.”

Shinra took a look at the unusually long message and cast her a mystified
look.

“What comes after that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’ll demand to know the location of my head.”
“And then? What will you do?”
“Well,” Celty typed, then stopped when she realized what Shinra was getting
at.
“This head has its own body now and could only scream when it saw you.
What are you going to do with it?”
Her hands lay flat on the keyboard. She had no answer.
“It’s living its own life with its own body and apparently knows teenagers
well enough to escape with one. What would you do with it? Cut it off the body
for your own sake? That’s a pretty cruel and vicious thing to do.”
After a heavy silence, Celty realized that she was trembling. Shinra spoke the
truth. The head did not seem to recognize her. Perhaps it was just the unfamiliar
riding suit—but the fact remained that the head had developed its own sense of
self that was apart from her.
If I’m going to recover my head for good, it will need to be separated from
that body. But is it right to sever a living head from a living body? Could I
convince the head to simply stay close to me with its new body? I might be
getting it back, but that doesn’t address the fundamental issue. Plus, I don’t feel

like I’m aging at all, but what about my head? Will it still be that young decades
later? What if it didn’t age while it was isolated, but something changes once
both parts of me are back together?

Before she could come to a conclusion, Celty decided to present her basic
doubts to Shinra.

“Why does my head have a body that isn’t mine anyway?”
“Well, I didn’t see it for myself, so nothing I say can be taken as fact. But if
you don’t mind completely baseless speculation, I can tell you my guess.”
Shinra paused for a moment, then delivered his ghastly theory in a matter-of-
fact tone.
“They probably found a girl with a fitting body and simply replaced her head
with yours.”
Celty had imagined that possibility, but it was horrifying to hear stated so
bluntly. She was left without a response, so Shinra added further speculation.
“Let’s say that a country—or even better, a secret military agency—got its
sinister hands on the head in the hopes of creating a legion of undead soldiers.
They cloned a fresh new body from the head’s cells, then replaced the clone’s
head with the real one in the hopes of unlocking the dullahan memories hidden
within. What do you think?”
“Sounds like a surefire Razzie winner to me,” Celty wrote, comparing his idea
to the infamous awards for worst movies of the year. Half of her completely
disregarded his idea—but the other half thought a secret lab was quite possible.
“Okay, the cloning angle might be a stretch, but it’s possible that they could
have sewed it onto a corpse. Either that or they kidnapped a living human, then
put the head on right after killing it to see if that would bring it back to life.
Logically, it’s an absolutely absurd idea, but logic also says that you and your
head are impossible to begin with. Maybe it could take over a dead body.”
“This makes me sick. I can’t imagine anyone would go that far.”
“True, it’s not the kind of thing a sane person would do. But people will do
just about anything under the right circumstances. Perhaps our mystery person
lost a daughter whom he or she wished to keep alive in perpetuity. Or maybe
they wanted to conceal an accidental murder victim by using the body for
research.”
In a way, that idea was even more gruesome than the human experimentation
he joked about earlier. Celty typed in a new message, simply to stop him from
saying any more.
“Anyway, I want to speak with my head once more. We can talk more after tha

—”
Shinra cut her off before she could finish. “And that’s how you’re going to

delay coming to an actual conclusion?”
His voice was deadly serious; there was no trace of the tickled, playful air

from just moments earlier.
I know. I get it. Now that I’ve found my head in this state, I just have to give

up.
She let that resignation sink in for a moment, then reluctantly typed, “I just

don’t want to admit that everything I’ve done over the last twenty years has been
for nothing.”

She stared sadly at the string of text. Shinra, who had been talking to her from
the other side of the apartment, finally came over to Celty’s room. He sat down
next to her and looked directly at her screen.

“It wasn’t for nothing. The last twenty years of your life haven’t been for
nothing. Nothing you’ve done is a waste as long as you make use of it in your
life ahead.”

“And how will I make use of that?”
“Well, for example…if you marry me, you can simply consider the last
twenty years the cornerstone of our marital bliss.”
Celty had no instant response to his shameless nonsense. Normally she’d
ignore it as a joke, but it seemed like Shinra took this topic rather seriously of
late.
“May I ask something?”
“Please do.”
She wasn’t sure if it was right to just ask her question straight out, but after a
few moments, Celty summoned her courage and tapped away at the keyboard.
“Do you really love me, Shinra?”
Shinra read the sentence and gaped up at the ceiling in disbelief.
“Why would you ask that now?! Ahh, there is a reason that terrible pain in the
chest brings tears to one’s eyes! What is my sorrow? The fact that you have not
believed everything I’ve done and said to you! My sorrow is that my love for
you does not reach your heart!”
“I don’t have a head.”
“But I’m in love with what’s inside! There’s more to a human being than
looks, remember?”
“I’m not human.”
In the end, I’m not a human being. I’m a monster in the shape of a human.

The problem is that with my memories trapped in my head, I don’t actually know
what I am or why I was born and why I exist.

Complex sentiments and unrelatable thoughts. Countless fragments swirled
through Celty’s heart, but the only thing she could impart were simple words on
a computer screen.

“Aren’t you frightened of holding affection for something inhuman? How can
you say these things to a being that doesn’t even follow the same basic laws of
physics?”

The letters sped up across the screen. In response, Shinra’s voice grew harder
and stronger. He sounded exasperated.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that after twenty years together… Why
would you even think about this? We share a mutual understanding—if we love
each other, what’s the problem? If you decide that you hate me, I guess that’s
that… But we’re not just forced to live together out of cold mutual dependence,
are we? Can’t you have some trust in me?”

It was rare for Shinra to sincerely plead his own case, but the abundance of
ten-dollar words said that he was not yet at the end of his rope.

“I do trust you. If there’s anyone I don’t trust, it’s myself.”
She decided to reveal some of her own insecurity while he was still feeling in
control.
“I have no self-confidence. Even if I was in love with you or some other
human being, would our romantic values actually be the same? Yes, I probably
do love you. I just don’t know if it’s what a human would call romantic love.”
“That’s something every human being goes through in their youth. It’s not as
if every human being shares the same views and values. Love to me may not be
the same as love to the great writer Osamu Dazai. In fact, it’s probably
different… At any rate, I can say that I love you, and you just said that you love
me, so where’s the problem?”
He sounded like a teacher explaining something to a student. The dullahan’s
fingers stopped moving.
“Yesterday I said I wanted to understand your values as a dullahan—but
whatever your answer is, it won’t change the fact that I love you,” Shinra said in
a voice free of shyness or hesitation. His expression was completely serious.
Celty thought this over for a moment, choosing her words carefully.
“Give me some time to think.”
“I’ll wait as long as it takes,” Shinra replied, his smile serene. Celty had to
ask one other thing.

“Is it really me you want? There are so many human women out there, why
would you choose a headle…a nonhuman woman? Why?”

“Ha-ha. There’s no accounting for taste, right?”
“You’re one to talk. And don’t make it sound like you have to be a weirdo to
like me.”
Even as she typed back her snappy response, Celty felt something hot
swirling in her chest. She knew that it was her feeling for Shinra.
If I had a heart, I’d hear it pounding away in my ears.
But that thought, that contradiction, plagued Celty even more. It only
underscored the great differences between her and Shinra.
Dullahans had no hearts. According to Shinra’s father after he dissected her,
she was constructed much like a human being—but the organs were all for show
and did not actually function. There were veins, but no blood running through
them. Without any red blood, her meat was the color of pure flesh, like a model
of a human body. He didn’t know how her body worked and moved. He didn’t
know what she used for a source of energy. And despite that, any wounds she
suffered healed at incredible speed.
After the dissection, Shinra’s father asked her, “How do you actually die?”
Ten years later, Shinra said, “You must be a shadow. You’re just the shadow
of your head or an actual body in some other world. The source of your energy
to move means nothing to your shadow.”
It was nonsense to think of a shadow moving of its own will, but then again,
nothing about her existence made sense, so she followed Shinra’s advice and
stopped thinking about it. She needed to spend the next few days focusing on her
head. And depending on the results of that period, she would make a decision
about her life.
Celty clenched a fist and pictured the faces of the two students she saw today.
They both looked serious. The first one glared back fiercely, without a hint of
fear toward Celty or Shizuo. The other one showed obvious signs of fright at
Celty, but he still had a smile on his face when he looked at her. It was the
expression of one looking at a demon or monster worthy of fear and respect.
She then thought about herself.
But perhaps that’s all just my own selfish interpretation.
She took her interpretation of the others’ feelings from their expressions,
including the eyes, but she couldn’t be certain that it was true. She did not have
her own eyes or face with which to express delight, anger or sadness. She didn’t
have a brain to process human emotions. She didn’t even know where her

thoughts or feelings were coming from. How could she accurately sense the
emotions of others?

Angry eyes, sad eyes, human morals—these were all pieces of knowledge she
had picked up in this city. TV shows, comics, movies—Shinra’s tastes biased her
selection of these things, but her actual experiences in town and news reports
helped to balance that out. The problem was that all these things were just
information gleaned from elsewhere. She wouldn’t know if they were true or not
unless she was a human being herself.

That was why she was always plagued by the insecurity she revealed to
Shinra earlier. She didn’t know if she truly had emotions. It was a thought that
constantly troubled her.

In the past, she didn’t care about these things. She was too busy seeking her
head. But in the last few years, as the Internet gave her increased opportunities to
contact people, she couldn’t help but wonder how close her feelings and values
were to those of humans.

At first, she found it frightening and needed Shinra’s help, but now Celty was
at the computer at virtually all times when not working or searching for her
head. Once she got a model with a built-in DVD drive and TV tuner, she could
get her movies and TV shows there, which only increased the time she spent
before the computer.

Celty increased her contact with others over the Internet. People separated by
their PCs did not know each other’s faces or pasts. Which was fine with her,
because she didn’t even have a face. And yet, the connections were real. In real
life, she only knew a few people through Shinra, and only he and his father knew
exactly what she was. Rumors had spread about the headless rider, but the
rumors didn’t identify her as a woman or a dullahan.

She didn’t feel a particular need to hide these things, but neither did she plan
to reveal them.

Even after what Shinra said, I still want to have human values. If the persona
that I own now is “human,” I don’t want to lose that.

Celty was not a human being. But she still felt anxiety. If she got back her
head but the memories did not return, what should she do? What kind of face
would a human make in this situation?

Her knowledge contained the answer, but she herself could not say what it
was.



Chapter 10: Dollars, Opening

The Yagiri Pharmaceuticals lab

In the meeting room of Lab Six, seated on a chair in the corner, Seiji grumbled to
himself, head downcast. His sister Namie gently embraced him in an attempt to
ease his discomfort.

“Everything’s fine, Seiji. Leave this to us. We’re going to get her back. Don’t
worry about a thing.”

The police dragged Seiji to their box station after Shizuo knocked him out,
but without a victim to finger him or even a firm consensus on who was the
victim, he was released without any charges or punishment.

Maybe it was my sister pulling strings. She did arrive to pick me up extremely
fast, Seiji thought. It didn’t actually bother him. I know she’s in love with me in
some kind of sick way. It only comes out of a weird possessiveness. But I don’t
mind. No matter who else loves me, it won’t change my own choice. I live for my
own love and nothing else.

And if I have to stomp all over the love others give me in order to do that, so
be it. I’m sure she’d be happy knowing she served as a stepping-stone for the
sake of her beloved.

Meanwhile, Namie could read Seiji like a book. But she didn’t mind. As long
as that head was in her possession, Seiji needed her. That head, the very target of
her darkest jealousy, was the key to the equation. Namie grinned in self-mockery
at the irony of it all.

The sight of her shamelessly doting on her brother put a kind of fear in the
minds of everyone who witnessed the scene.

One of her employees overcame his consternation and called out for her
attention.

“You don’t need to worry about a thing, Seiji. Leave everything to us.”
And with that, his sister quietly left the room.

“Do we have details?”
“We’ve got the address of this Ryuugamine that Mr. Seiji spoke of. It’s a run-
down apartment building right next to Ikebukuro Station.”
Namie was receiving the report from her subordinates slightly down the
hallway from the meeting room. The fact that the employee was giving Seiji that
title spoke to the strength of the Yagiri family within the company.
Unlike her warm, loving manner in the meeting room, Namie was as cold as
ice as she gave the orders.
“Then gather up the underlings and retrieve the target.”
“That’s a conspicuous place for a daylight operation—”
“I don’t care,” she stated flatly, brooking no further discussion.
If we wait for nightfall, my brother’s going to run off and try to find this
Ryuugamine on his own.
Namie cared more about Seiji’s safety than the danger of the situation. But
she was professional enough not to show the tiniest ounce of this priority when
Seiji wasn’t around. She was all business.
“Inform all of our available muscle at once. I don’t care who’s there or if
they’re taken dead or alive. Depending on the circumstances, I may want you to
dispose of them on the spot.”
There wasn’t a shred of humanity in her eyes. The other men felt cold sweat
trickle down their backs.

Today was the start of normal classes for Raira Academy. But even then, it
mostly consisted of teacher introductions and guidance on the course of the
entire school year, and the only classes with real lectures were math and world
history.

Nothing else noteworthy or problematic occurred. The first day passed by.
If anything weighed on Mikado’s mind, it was the absence of not only Mika
Harima, but now Seiji Yagiri, the Health Committee representative. After Anri
had explained what happened between the two of them the day before, it was
hard not to feel a connection in their absences. An uneasy murmur rose in his
chest.
On top of that, there was also his unease over the girl with amnesia back at
his house.
She did not remember anything more after waking up this morning and

refused to go to the hospital or police. The suggestion of the hospital, in
particular, brought a look of terror into her eyes.

“Oh…I’ll be fine! I’ll just stay here and wait for you!” she said, looking far
calmer today than she had the day before. In fact, she looked quite secure and
focused for someone suffering memory loss.

That at least gave Mikado enough confidence to leave her behind while he
was at school, but he still had no idea what to do with her after that. Without
knowing her identity, there was no getting around the fact that she’d need to be
handed over to the police at some point. He thought about the option of
Masaomi’s house, but Masaomi commuted to school from his family’s home.

Mikado spent the entire day mulling over what to do, and before he arrived at
an answer, the day was done. There was a brief introductory meeting for all of
the class reps, after which he headed outside with Anri, hoping to ask for any
updates on Mika Harima.

“Have you heard from her?” Mikado didn’t have anything else to talk about
and felt awkward not saying anything, so he decided to be direct.

“Actually, I haven’t heard a thing from her since yesterday afternoon…”
“Oh, I see…”
He shouldn’t have asked. Now he was even more worried about the fact that
Seiji was absent as well. He began to wonder about the possibility of some kind
of murder-suicide but didn’t dare say that out loud to Anri.
Masaomi’s presence would have helped out a lot, but from what he heard, the
Discipline Committee was still busy with introductions. Apparently, Masaomi
and the representative from Mikado’s class had launched into an argument that
no one else was quite able to stop.
He decided his best action was just to go home for today and was preparing to
say good-bye to Anri at the ornate Western-style front gate when someone
shouted at them from the side.
“Aha! That’s him, Takashi, right there!”
A girl was pointing in Mikado and Anri’s direction. It was the one whose cell
phone had been stomped by Izaya yesterday, and she was escorted by a burly
looking guy.
Before he could even register a sense of dread at the unfolding situation,
Mikado was lifted up by the collar.
“I hear you know the guy who busted my girl’s cell.”
“I don’t know him know him—”
You should be telling the police about this, not your boyfriend, Mikado

wanted to yell at Bully A next to the guy, but he couldn’t speak with a hand
pulling him up by the collar.

“So where’s this dick you were standin’ around with?”

Straight as an arrow—he asked about Izaya directly, without allowing Mikado
any say.

Elusive as quicksilver—a pitch-black bike silently appeared behind the man.

Swift as the wind—still on the bike, a humanoid shadow kicked Takashi to
the ground.

Survival of the fittest—out of nowhere, Izaya Orihara landed on the fallen
man’s back with both feet.

Man’s inhumanity to man—Izaya jumped up and down on his back
repeatedly.

Like greased lightning—this happened before Mikado’s eyes in the span of
ten seconds.

“Thank you.”
Izaya bowed ostentatiously in the direction of the shocked Anri, her bully,
and all the other students who happened to be passing by. He was still standing
atop the unconscious Takashi.
“You knew that hitting girls wasn’t my thing, so you made sure to prepare a
guy for me instead! Now that’s the sign of a dedicated woman. I’d love to make
you my girlfriend, but sorry. You’re just not my type. Get lost.”
It was all very cruel, but the girl was off and running before he even finished
speaking. She didn’t even spare a backward glance at Takashi underneath Izaya’s
feet. Mikado had to admit that he felt a bit sorry for the guy.
The girl’s face already vanishing from his memory, Izaya turned to Mikado.
“Heya, it’s too bad we were interrupted yesterday. I don’t think we have to
worry about our friend Shizu butting in here. I thought it would be rude to look
up your address and barge in, so I decided to lie in wait at the school entrance
instead,” he said, smiling all the while. Mikado didn’t know why Izaya was
smiling or what reason he would have to seek him out. But that actually wasn’t
true—he knew of one possible reason. Mikado couldn’t openly acknowledge it,

though. He clenched a fist.
Seemingly unaware of the boy’s train of thought, Izaya tilted his head in

confusion.
“By the way, what’s the Black Rider doing here?”

I could ask the same of you, Celty thought to herself.
She had indeed found the student who escorted her head away yesterday. She
intervened to save him from being pounded, but Izaya’s presence was a mystery
to her.
Celty couldn’t imagine Izaya getting involved with an ordinary person, much
less a teenage student. Was he the son of some powerful politician? Or some
kind of despicable pusher, spreading drugs to children in elementary and middle
school?
But whoever the boy was made no difference to Celty now.
All that mattered was whether he knew the location of her head or not.

Mikado snapped to his senses with a shock when he realized that Anri was
even more dazed by the incident than he was.

“W-well, Sonohara, I should really be going!”
“Huh…? Um, okay…”
And with that awkward farewell, Mikado quickly left the scene. As he
suspected, the shadow and villain followed him. Once a safe distance away from
the school, he timidly turned back and decided that Izaya was more likely to
understand him.
“Umm… I don’t know what’s going on here… But if you’d like, we can go
back to my…”
Mikado stopped and held his breath. If he took them back to his house, the
Black Rider would find that girl. In fact, she was probably the only reason that
the Black Rider had come for him in the first place.
“Uh…well, actually, there’s something I’d like to ask the rider in black…”
Celty pulled a PDA out of the shadow riding suit and typed, “What is it?”
So there was a way for them to communicate after all. Mikado was slightly
relieved but also noted that the situation was taking a turn into even more surreal
waters.
I feel like crying.

Just a few minutes away from the station by foot was a building. It was hard to
guess exactly how old it was, but the countless tiny cracks in the walls and the
abundant ivy said enough on their own.

Once the building came into view, Mikado stopped and said, “Well, my
apartment is on the first floor of this building…but I want an explanation first.
Who in the world are you people?”

Celty avoided mentioning anything about her head or her true identity. She
only typed, “I recently ran into a girl I knew who had gone missing, but she fled
for some reason I cannot fathom.”

But Mikado was not naive enough to take such a transparent excuse at face
value. Celty decided that she didn’t have a choice but to give him the truth.

She asked Izaya to give them some momentary privacy, then took Mikado
around the back of the building. Summoning her courage, she started typing on
the PDA.

“How much do you know about me?”
Mikado stared at the tiny LCD screen, then gave the question some thought.
“Well…you’re sort of an urban legend, and you ride a motorcycle without
headlights that makes no sound. And…”
He paused, sucking in a deep breath, then letting it all out at once. Along with
the fear in his voice, there was something expectant, even excited.
“…you don’t have a head.”
Celty typed, “And do you believe all of it?”
She showed him the screen, then immediately regretted it. What human being
would possibly believe that? But Mikado nodded.
Huh?
She couldn’t hide her shock. Mikado went on.
“Um…can you show me what’s inside your helmet?”
Celty stared him right in the face.
Aha, just like yesterday.
That strange expression again, a mix of fear, expectation, despair, and joy all
in one. And the student with all of these emotions in his eyes wanted her to
expose her true face to him. Celty hesitated, then typed in her PDA.
“Do you swear you won’t scream?”
She knew it was a stupid question, but she had to be sure. Celty hadn’t
removed her helmet for anyone in the last twenty years but Shinra. There had
been a few times it popped off in the middle of a fight, but the only reaction she
got from the witnesses was a grimace of terror.

But this young man named Mikado was facing his fear directly. He believed
that her word was not a lie or a joke and still asked her to see. It was foolish to
ask such a man if he wouldn’t scream.

Mikado’s reaction was exactly as she expected. His head nodded vigorously,
and at the same time, Celty pushed the visor of the full helmet upward.

Darkness. There was nothing before his eyes but empty space. Technically, it
wasn’t empty in the vacuum sense, but that made no difference to Mikado. It was
a space where what should exist did not, and the presence or absence of anything
to fill that space was immaterial.

Nothing. There’s nothing there. It’s not a magic trick—but if it were, I’d sure
like to know how to pull it off.

For the first instant, Mikado’s eyes were wide with terror, but it did not lead
to a scream. He stifled that emotion, and his shock turned to elation. There were
even little tears forming at the bottom of his eyes.

“Thank you…thank you.”
What he was thanking her for was unclear, but his eyes were full of childlike
wonder. She was completely at a loss for what to do.
It was rare enough for her to be thanked, much less meet acceptance for the
idea that she had no head, that the situation was entirely baffling—but not in a
bad or uncomfortable way.
After Celty explained the situation to him, Mikado happily agreed to let her
see the “head girl.” When he told the dullahan that the girl’s memory was gone,
Celty had no immediate answer. She said she had to see the girl so that the
misunderstanding could be corrected.
They called Izaya back at this point, but he claimed that his business could
wait until later. He stayed back and watched the other two.
“All right… Please wait here for now. I’ll go in first and talk to her. I don’t
want her to see you first before I can explain your presence here, in case she gets
the wrong idea.”
“I understand.”
Izaya piped up with a sarcastic-sounding “Very cautious—that’s a good
stance to take.”
They waited outside the apartment building as Mikado went in. As they stood
there, Izaya said, “By the way, courier, I hadn’t caught your name before this.
Didn’t realize you weren’t from around these parts.”
He grinned. Based on the smirk, he probably already knew that, and it was

meant to be a dig at Celty’s uptight refusal to name herself. She understood all of
this already and chose to ignore him. It was possible that he even knew what she
was—but only cobbled together from eyewitness accounts, not because he
recognized her as a fairy.

Not to mention that any levelheaded person would not even imagine that the
Black Rider could be anything but a human being. The problem was that Izaya
was not levelheaded. He was not a man to be underestimated.

“So what’s taking him so long?”
It had been more than five minutes. Even if he had failed in his negotiation,
he should have at least come back out to explain by now.
“Maybe I should take a look.”
The apartment building was too quiet. Celty felt a creeping unease steal over
her. That unease was amplified by a cleaning service van parked next to the
building.
A professional cleaner at a dump like this? Not likely…

Her fear was well-founded.
“I’ll ask again… We know you were keeping a girl here in your apartment.
We just wanna know where she is now.”
“There’s no use denying it. We found a woman’s hair in your bed. Pretty short
cut but clearly longer than yours.”
Two men were waiting for Mikado when he entered his apartment. They were
wearing work uniforms, but one look at their faces said they weren’t simple
laborers. Mikado was shoved to the floor before he could say a word, and they
kept interrogating him, over and over, in low, menacing voices.
They were looking for the “head girl,” but Mikado wanted to know her
location just as much as they did. Either someone else had already taken her
away, or she’d gotten up and run off on her own…
“I-I don’t know! Please, I really don’t know!”
“Listen, kid. You’ve seen our faces. We could make you disappear right now,”
one said like some kind of gloating movie villain. Mikado felt tears of fright
welling up in his eyes. He felt so stupid—just moments ago, he’d been filled
with joy at the sight of something inhuman and alien, and now he was mired in
terror of plain old humanity again. He lamented his carelessness.
“Someone’s here!”
The men jumped up without hesitation and raced out. In a few moments, the
van’s engine started outside.

“Whew…I’m saved…”
In particular, he was saved from the shame of shedding tears of fright. He did
not, however, avoid tears of relief.

Celty raced past the door of the apartment and made to chase after the van,
but Izaya said there was no need to do that.

“I’m pretty sure they’re from Yagiri Pharmaceuticals. I recognize the van,” he
noted, a free piece of intel from the info broker.

“Yagiri…Pharmaceuticals…?”
“Yep. A company down on its luck, in danger of being bought out by foreign
capital.”
When he processed that name, Mikado’s teary eyes went wide. Yes, it was the
same name as his classmate—but he recognized that name from something else.
The tears drained back into their ducts.
A girl bearing a head gone missing. A dullahan. Yagiri. Pharmaceutical
company. Missing people. Mika Harima. Anri Sonohara’s story. Seiji Yagiri.
Kidnappers. Dollars.
Various fragments of information floated into Mikado’s head and
disappeared. The free flow of concepts coalesced into a theory.
In the now-quiet apartment, Mikado quickly started his computer. While he
waited for it to boot up, he turned on his phone, which had been off since school,
and immediately checked his e-mail.
Celty watched him curiously. In contrast, Izaya was like a hunter watching
over rare prey, his sharp eyes gleaming wickedly.
“You know, I had my doubts,” the information broker started. Mikado opened
his Internet browser the instant his computer had fully booted and typed in some
kind of code with tremendous speed. He was logging into a website. After that
came the rhythmic sound of mouse clicking.
Mikado examined the page for a little while, then turned to his guests.
Celty shivered despite herself. His eyes did not have the bedraggled look of
the boy who’d been helpless to stop the circumstances around him for the past
hour. His were the eyes of a hawk following its quarry, endlessly deep and sharp.
He bowed to them.
She was taken aback. He didn’t seem to be the same weak-willed student who
was just here moments ago.
“I need your help. Can I count on your assistance for just a short while?” he
asked, full of purpose and determination. “The pawns are in the palm of my

hand.”
Izaya patted Celty on the shoulder and boasted as though he’d just found a

new toy. “Jackpot.”

Celty looked back and forth between the two, unsure of what Izaya meant.
She didn’t know what had just happened, but she could tell that Izaya was more
excited now than she’d ever seen before. And even more excited was Mikado
Ryuugamine.

His face still had the trappings of childhood, and now his eyes were shining
like a boy who’d just received a new toy. There was no sign of the tears of terror
anymore, only an expression of strong will and elation that said he was in full
control of himself.

Over the last few days since his arrival in Ikebukuro, Mikado had run across a
number of baffling, inexplicable events. And right before his eyes, they were all
connecting into one convoluted case.

He breathed heavily, mentally examining each piece of the puzzle to make
sure they fit together.

Boring days. Familiar sights. Stuck in place with no future.
It was to escape all of these things that he decided to move to Ikebukuro. And
now he could feel himself achieving that escape at last.
Mikado Ryuugamine realized that he was becoming a kind of lead player in
this story. At the same time, an enemy had appeared that threatened his new life
—and his life, period.
In his state of excitement, he felt no hesitation or fear toward the need to
eliminate that foe.
The time had come to speak. He started to explain everything about himself
to Celty and Izaya.

In the hallway outside of Lab Six beneath Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, a cold voice
split the air.

“What do you mean…she wasn’t there?”
“Apparently, when the underlings reached the place, there were signs that the
lock had already been pried open…and no sign of the girl inside.”
“So someone got the jump on us?”
“The place is a dump, so it’s unlikely to be a burglar.”

Namie’s brows knitted together in thought. If the student took her out, then
what would be the purpose of breaking open the lock? On the other hand, she
couldn’t think of anyone aside from her company who would want the girl.

“And the student who lives there?”
“When they returned to report, they claimed they were prepared to bring him
back with them, but he had…company.”
“So why didn’t they bring him, company and all? Such incompetence…”
She clicked her tongue in irritation just before her phone started ringing. The
display said it was an unlisted number, but she answered anyway on the chance
that it was important.
“Hello?”
“Um, is this Miss Namie Yagiri?”
The voice was young. It sounded like a teenage boy, probably in middle
school.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“My name is Mikado Ryuugamine.”
“—!”
Namie’s heart silently upped its pulse. Her brother’s classmate, the one who
took the girl away with him. There was an eeriness to the fact that he was calling
right as they’d been talking about him. She wondered how he’d even gotten her
number.
Meanwhile, the voice on the other end of the call continued on its business.
“As it happens, we have a certain young lady under our care at this
moment…”
After a brief pause, the phone produced a message that made no sense at all,
devoid of even the slightest bit of tension, as matter-of-fact as if it were asking
her out to dinner.
“…How about we make a deal?”

11:00 p.m., the same day, Ikebukuro

Night had fallen on 60-Kai Street in Ikebukuro. The shutters were down on
virtually every business except for the bars, and unlike during the day, the
pedestrians no longer ruled the street—there were actual cars going to and fro
now.

A young man in a bartender’s uniform leaning against a streetlamp spoke to
an enormous black man.

“What is life? What do people live for? Someone asked me that once, and I
beat him within an inch of his life. It’d be one thing if it was a starry-eyed
dreamer of a teenage girl, but from a grown man who wanted to be a yakuza but
tried to get out because he didn’t like running errands? It’s practically a crime.”

“That’s right!”
“Everyone’s free to think what they want about their own life. No one can
deny you that. But why the hell would you ask for answers from another person?
So I told him, ‘This is your life, live so you can die,’ while his pupils dilated.
Then again, that was the bar manager, so I probably screwed up again.”
“That’s right!”
“…Simon, I get the feeling you don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“That’s right!”
Shizuo Heiwajima bellowed and threw a nearby bicycle at Simon, who
caught it one-handed. The town swallowed up this scene, assimilating it—
business as usual.
When night hit Ikebukuro, it was a completely different place than during the
daytime. It was just as crowded and chaotic, but blackness swallowed
everything, so that the world seemed to be in negative. Nowadays, more people
were utilizing cheap manga cafés to spend the night than more expensive hotels.
Missing the last train was no longer the big deal it had once been.
On streets close to the train station, karaoke barkers hustled about, latching
onto groups of students and new employees out for a celebration. Most of those
groups already had their next destinations picked out, and they gradually faded
away from the street.
People left drinking establishments and headed home, young people partied
through the night, and smatterings of foreigners dotted the scene. It wasn’t on the
same level as when the sun was out, but the night had its own crowded bustle.

However…
In front of the Tokyu Hands store that intersected the main road, two people
stood apart from the crowd.
One was a student wearing his uniform jacket. The other was a grown woman
wearing a business suit.
Now that they were both at the agreed-upon location, Namie Yagiri asked the
boy, “You’re Mikado? You’re so mature—not at all the child I was expecting. Or

is it the polite ones who are most dangerous these days?”
Her voice was soft but rimmed with infinite frost.
They did not leave for another location to talk, but stayed in place right

outside the building. The chilly, overbearing air she wielded kept all of the
karaoke and host clubs’ solicitors away, as well as any overeager men looking
for companionship.

Meanwhile, Mikado wore his Raira Academy blazer, but no attitude that
made him anything but a normal student. The solicitors weren’t going to bother
upselling a lone teenager like him. In fact, it was more likely that if he hung
around in his current outfit, he’d draw the attention of the police for being where
he shouldn’t.

They were two souls who didn’t fit in the scene for opposite reasons. A quiet
tension fomented between them.

“So…what is your proposition?” Namie asked.
He’d managed to get her to negotiate in person; he probably knew just about
everything. The girl must have told him all that she knew over the course of the
evening.
“It’s simple. As I told you over the phone, I have the person you’re looking
for.”
This did not unnerve Namie. If he was proposing this deal in possession of all
of the facts, he really had to be a child. It was the height of folly.
He must have designated this location right in the middle of 60-Kai Street
thinking that such a public location meant they couldn’t play rough with him.
But of course, she had not come alone. The company’s security team, normally
in charge of guarding the research lab, was disguised in the crowd as ordinary
salarymen. Nearly a dozen loyal employees were on standby with stun batons.
Just in case they were necessary, vans parked along 60-Kai Street and in side
alleys contained more underlings and other hired muscle types, about twenty in
total.
It wasn’t just the one boy, of course. He wouldn’t be trying to strike such a
deal without others on his side. Hence the necessity of such a large force behind
her.
In addition, Namie had brought a reasonable amount of cash to help strike a
deal, in recognition of his admirable pluck. As long as she got the girl back, they
could crush the boy in an instant if he thought he could open his mouth.
“How much do you want?” she asked directly. No need for theatrics in such a
silly transaction. There was no telling where he might have hidden a recorder, if

she was careless and gave away some kind of personal secret.
But his answer caught her by surprise.
“It’s not money, actually.”
“What are you dealing for, then?”
“Don’t you know? The truth.”
What does he mean? she wondered, baffled.
Mikado laid out his conclusion. “Let’s start with an admission of what your

brother—Seiji Yagiri—is responsible for doing.”
“ !”
The warm spring air instantly turned to midwinter chill. After a long silence,

Namie fixed him with a stare that froze anyone who looked at it and spoke in a
voice that demolished any who heard it.

“What…did you…just say?”
“Confess what your brother did to Mika Harima—and what you did to her
body after that. Unfortunately, since there’s only circumstantial evidence, I’ll
need you to turn yourselves in.”
Despite the easiness of his speech, sweat flooded Mikado’s palms. Black rage
was exploding off of her. If he let his guard down just the tiniest bit, he might
burst into tears.
“I think that course of action would do the least damage to your company.”
“Oh, dear… Yes, I see… You don’t want money at all. You just want our lab
to be shut down for good…”
“In order to guarantee her freedom—not to mention my safety, since she
ended up at my home—that seems to be the only option. If you simply bow out,
I don’t see why that should lead to the downfall of the company.”
As he spoke, Mikado noticed that her reaction had started to go strange.
“Oh…oh…such a shame… You see, the company means absolutely nothing
to me.”
She pierced Mikado with a look that he couldn’t distinguish between laughing
or crying. He grappled with this new revelation, waiting for her next line. All of
Mikado’s hair stood on end as he fought against the pressure of receiving his
death sentence.
She didn’t even seem to be the same coolheaded woman who arrived in front
of the department store building—but her voice was still soft and calm.
“You can crush my company, bomb it to hell, burn it to the ground, and I
wouldn’t care a whit. But…the one thing I won’t stand for…is someone who
tries to stand between my brother and what he wants.”

Her answer was simple. So simple, in fact, that Mikado’s eyes narrowed in a
kind of relief.

Oh, I get it. She’s one of those people. No wonder she’s been doing things that
go above and beyond her company’s bottom line.

At the same moment that her fists clenched, Mikado tightened his own grip
on the cell phone in his pocket, pressing the button to send an e-mail.

This would explain it.
He was nearly bowled over backward by her incredible fixation on her
brother but held his ground and glared back at her.
One person’s already been killed, the body was used to create a totally new
person, and now she’s trying to have me killed, too. I think the last part is what
makes me angriest. I care about myself most of all. I would do anything for my
own sake. That’s what makes people like her, who replace the “my” in “my
sake” with another person, so aggravating. And someone who would use that
excuse to ruin the lives of others is especially, especially, especially
unforgivable!
Anger began to bubble up within Mikado. He was obsessed with all things
extraordinary and abnormal but being the victim of irrational, unfair
circumstances was something else entirely. He launched into Namie.
“I’ve never heard such an awful thing. You’re going to make Yagiri miserable
for your own twisted, selfish reasons.”
“What do you mean? If you’re going to brave the depths of the underworld at
your age, and all you can come up with is that clichéd garbage…then shut that
impertinent mouth of yours right now!” she roared like some kind of witch’s
curse, closing a step toward Mikado.
But he did not pull back.
“You’re right, I only know how to speak in clichés. But what’s wrong with
that? And which one of us is incapable of comprehending the obvious fact that
there’s a price to be paid for taking a human life?”
Mikado took a step of his own, returning her glare.
“You’ve watched too much TV. The old-fashioned kind with a moral at the
end of the story! Do you know where we are?! This is the real world! You’re not
on TV, you’re not in a magazine, and you’re not a hero. Learn your place, boy!”
They each approached another step. Namie’s voice was overflowing with cold
fury, but those words on their own were not enough to stop him. He’d suffered
the nonsense of Masaomi Kida’s conversations every day. Compared to them,
her arguments were at least logical, and thus easy to rebut.